Optical waveguides are the cornerstone of integrated optical circuits. An optical waveguide or combination of optical waveguides is typically assembled to form devices such as couplers, splitters, ring resonators, arrayed waveguide gratings, mode transformers, and the like. These devices are further combined on an optical chip to create an integrated optical device or circuit for performing the desired optical functions, such as, for example, switching, splitting, combining, multiplexing, demultiplexing, filtering, and clock distribution. As used herein, the expression “integrated optical circuits” may include a combination of optically transparent elongated structures for guiding, manipulating, or transforming optical signals that are formed on a common substrate or chip of monolithic or hybrid construction.
Typically, formation of the waveguide begins with formation of the lower optical cladding on a suitable substrate, followed by formation of an optical core, typically by chemical vapor deposition, lithographic patterning, and etching, and finally, surrounding the core with an upper optical cladding layer. For example, a ridge waveguide is typically formed on a substrate by forming a lower optical cladding, then forming through chemical vapor deposition, lithographic patterning, and etching, an optical core element, and lastly by surrounding the optical core element with an upper optical cladding layer. Other types of optical waveguides used in the formation of integrated optical devices and circuits include slab, ridge loaded, trench defined, and filled trench waveguides.
Further, semiconductor devices often include multiple layers of conductive, insulating, and semiconductive layers. Often, the desirable properties of such layers improve with the crystallinity of the layer. Attempts have been made to fabricate high quality crystalline optical waveguide devices. However, such attempts typically have succeeded only on bulk oxide substrates. Attempts to grow such devices on a single crystal semiconductor or compound semiconductors substrates, such as germanium, silicon, and various insulators, have generally been unsuccessful because crystal lattice mismatches between the host crystal of the substrate and the grown crystal of the optical waveguide layer have caused the resulting crystal of the optical waveguide layer to be of low crystalline quality.
Silicon (Si) is the most widely used semiconductor material in modern electronic devices. Single crystalline Si of high quality is readily available, and the processing and microfabrication of Si are well known. The transparency of Si in the near-infrared makes Si an ideal optical material.
In part due to these ideal optical properties, Si-based waveguides are often employed as optical interconnects on Si integrated circuits, or to distribute optical clock signals on an Si-based microprocessor. In these and other instances, Si provides improved integration with existing electronics and circuits. However, at present pure Si optical waveguide technology is not well developed, in part because fabrication of waveguides in Si requires a core with a higher refractive index than that of crystalline Si (c-Si).
Historically, optical links were single wavelength and point-to-point, with all functionality in the electronics domain. The implementation of telecommunication functions in the optical domain, in conjunction with the aforementioned development of the understanding of silicon as an optical material, led to the development of the optical integrated circuit (OEIC). The OEIC fabrication process borrows heavily from the electronic integrated circuit field, and as such may employ planar deposition, photolithography, and dry etching to form optical waveguides analogous to electronic circuit conductors.
Attempts to integrate voltage-controlled switching and attenuation functions into a silica glass platform exposed drawbacks stemming from the incorporation of classical IC technology for OEIC, including difficulty in processing optical materials with standard microelectronics fabrication equipment, a lack of repeatability, and high power consumption that caused chip-heating problems. Fortunately, silicon optical waveguiding technology provides for the production of low-cost, reliable, repeatable, low power silicon OEICs.
A difficult challenge facing high-index contrast optical systems is efficiently coupling light into and out of the OEIC. Particularly challenging is the coupling of light from a standard optical fiber or external light source to a silicon waveguide. A single-mode fiber core (n=1.5) typically has a diameter of 8 μm with a symmetric mode, but a silicon waveguide (n=3.45) is typically only a few micrometers in width with an asymmetric mode. To overcome these large differences in effective index, core size, and symmetry, a frequently used coupling is a waveguide taper.
Tapers reduce coupling loss through an adiabatic modal transformation, and may be used to increase the alignment tolerance of other optical devices, such as III-V lasers. Taper methods include pseudo-vertical tapering, and gradual horizontal and vertical modal tapering. Pseudo-vertical tapering, for example, from a 12 μm by 12 μm input to 4-5 μm waveguide has demonstrated losses as low as 0.5 dB/facet.
Therefore, a need exists for a silicon based semiconductor structure that provides a high quality optical waveguide interface and for a process for making such a structure for the formation of quality optical waveguide devices.